Maintenance

Dealers

Finding and training technicians, purchasing tools and equipment, maintaining a parts inventory, dealing with OSHA and the EPA. These are just a few of the headaches fleets that maintain their own trucks face.

There’s no shortage of readers who want me to intervene on their behalf because they’ve been victimized in some way. At least that’s how they describe their plight. Maybe it’s a “lemon” of a truck, possibly a contract dispute, sometimes a fight with an idiotic bureaucracy. For reasons I don’t always understand, they think I’m a consumer watchdog of some sort. I’m not.

It is an old trucking industry adage that while the sales department sells the first truck, the service department sells the second, third and fourth trucks. According to David Gerrard, senior vice president of distribution at Navistar, “Without an effective relationship on the service side of the house, it is very difficult to maintain the customer relationship.”